vintage publishing united kingdom london (Over 4,900 results)

Paperback. Condition: Fine. Vonny lives on the island of Martha's Vineyard with her husband Andre and son Simon. Their neighbour Elizabeth, a woman in her seventies, falls from an upstairs window and her granddaughter Jody is summoned to nurse her through her convalescence. The scene is set for a magical story of love and loneliness, of terror and human frailty, of the mystery and grace of ordinary experience. Alice Hoffman's ability to fuse the domestic and the mythic in a narrative of such gentle yet magnetic force confirms her stature as one of the most gifted of American novelists.

Paperback. Condition: Fine. Eleven year old Ajuba has been abandoned at a Devon boarding school by her Ghanaian father. Haunted by the circumstances of her mother's breakdown, Ajuba falls under the spell of new girl Polly Venus, and her chaotic, glamorous family. As the passionate bond between the two girls deepens, they discover what they think are the bones of dead kittens, hidden in the attic of the Venus home; but the bones are human. The girls set out to unravel the mystery but as the summer draws to a close, three tragedies conflate, with catastrophic results.

Paperback. Condition: Good. Loretta Lawson is spending this weekend in a borrowed flat in New York on one of the hottest weekends of the summer. She has hardly arrived in the city when she gets the first of a series of obscene phone calls, and the next day, in the Metropolitan Museum, she gets the feeling that someone is watching and following her. She tries to shrug it off, but then several disturbing incidents occur which are not easy to dimiss, and the one person who might be able to help -her ex-husband John Tracey, in New York on a story - has too many problems of her own. Challenging, witty and unsettling, FULL STOP is Joan Smith's most sophisited and suspenseful novel to date. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Good. The story of the death, in sinister circumstances, of the boy-king Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, is one of the most fascinating murder mysteries in English history. It is a tale with profound moral and social consequences, rich in drama, intrigue, treason, scandal and violence. In this gripping book Alison Weir re-examines all the evidence - including that against the Princes' uncle, Richard III, whose body was recently discovered beneath a Leicester car park. She brilliantly reconstructs the whole chain of events leading to their murder and reveals how, why and by whose order they died. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. This is the story of a group of men and women. As they experience the consolations and complications of relationships with the opposite sex, they confront the obscure difference between privacy and intimacy, and the fine distinction between pleasing another and pleasing oneself. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Compiled from interviews, diaries, letters and contemporaneous first-person accounts - many never before published - this oral history follows the adventures of the courageous men and women who volunteered for service with Britain's Special Operations Executives and the United States' Office of Strategic Services. They parachuted behind enemy lines, often alone, with orders to cause mayhem. Arrest almost always resulted in torture and emprisonment; sometimes in execution. In occupied France, equipped with false identities, they played a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Gestapo; in the Balkans they discovered that the fiery politics of the region were as dangerous as the enemy; in the Burmese jungle they led native marauders in surprise attacks against the Japanese. Supported by a team of back-room boffins who dreamed up ingenious devices like exploding rats and invisible ink, the special agents of World War Two really were a breed apart. This is their extraordinary story, in their own words. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. A writer of revelatory genius Guardian Following the bizarre accidental death of his wife, Israeli secret service agent Yoel Ravid retires to the suburbs with his daughter, mother and mother-in-law. After a lifetime of uncovering other people's secrets he is forced to look back at the lies he has told himself; at the desolate enigma of his wife's life and death; his years of service to the state and the riddle of his daughter's behaviour. Humorous, melancholy and touching New York Times. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Good. Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, Hannah Luckraft is starting to notice that her lifestyle is not entirely sustainable: her subconscious is turning against her, her soul is a little unwell. Her family is wounded, her friends are odd, her body is not as reliable as it once was and her drinking is frankly out of hand. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of the problem she must cure. From the north-east of Scotland to Dublin, from London to Montreal, to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels in search of the ultimate altered state: the one where she can be happy - her paradise. Paradise is a compelling examination of failure that is also a comic triumph, a novel of dark extremes that is full of the most ravishing lyrical beauty. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Good. In the late 1950s, the spry, debonair and well-dressed Malcolm Bradbury returned from the United States, slightly shattered but not quite broken, to a Britain that, by all reports, was changing. In this novel, the author of "The History Man" takes on the consumer society and the British character. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Formed in the mists of New Year's Eve, The Sex Division sees procreation at its most material, as five men devise a point system based upon the act. A missing brother, prophetic visions, a love-affair, and a confrontation draw the characters out into the open, revealing the men behind the machismo. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. Read the lost masterpiece behind the major new film starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Michelle Williams Set during the year that France fell to the Nazis, Suite Francaise falls into two parts. The first is a brilliant depiction of a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion; the second follows the inhabitants of a small rural community under occupation. Suite Francaise is a novel that teems with wonderful characters struggling with the new regime. However, amidst the mess of defeat, and all the hypocrisy and compromise, there is hope. True nobility and love exist, but often in surprising places. Irene Nemirovsky began writing Suite Francaise in 1940, but her death in Auschwitz prevented her from seeing the day, sixty-five years later, that the novel would be discovered by her daughter and hailed worldwide as a masterpiece. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Good. When a teacher is found dead, having apparently committed suicide, his friend Pierre Hoffman takes over class 4F and finds himself responsible for a group of strangely subdued, well-behaved and yet menacing pupils. Assuming their behaviour to be a response to the trauma of their teacher's death, Pierre Hoffman at first takes it easy with the precocious class, refusing to embrace the hostility felt by other staff members towards the children. Over the weeks that follow, however, he receives a series of signals and warnings that cause him to question the motivations of his pupils and the circumstances of his colleague's suicide. Refusing to believe that the situation can be any more sinister than his suspicious imagination, Hoffman applauds and supports class 4F's decision to organise a school trip to the Normandy coast. Only once the trip has begun, however, does Hoffman begin to understand the extent of their bizarre solidarity and their ultimate goal. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. For seven years, Xinran Xue hosted a daily radio phone-in programme for Radio Nanjing during which she discussed women's lives, and invited women to call in and talk about themselves. Broadcast between 10 and 12 at night, Words on the Night Breeze soon became famous all over China for its powerful, honest discussions of what it means to be a woman in today's China. It started in 1990, a time when China seemed to be 'opening up', both for the Chinese and for the world. Xinran's programme revealed aspects of women's lives that had never been talked about in public before. She felt as if she was opening a tiny window into a huge fortress whose inhabitants had never before communicated with the outside world. Soon she was receiving over two hundred letters a day from women telling her their stories. She realised that she knew far less than she had thought about what it means to be a Chinese woman and embarked on a journey of discovery to collect their stories. The stories presented here tell of almost inconceivable suffering: rape, sexual abuse, the separation of parents from their children, the suppression of human emotion in order to survive the Communist regime - never before have the tortured souls of Chinese women been laid so bare. And yet this is also a book about love - about how, despite cruelty, despite politics, the female urge to nurture and cherish remains. And then there is Xinran herself: an extraordinary woman who, despite her own unhappy past, has given her life to saving the stories of Chinese women from oblivion, The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Fair. Alan Mackenzie's bad back is ruining both his and his wife Jane's lives. After years of happy marriage, these two attractive and intelligent people have stopped making love and are starting to resent each other. However, the arrival of a new couple in town - the beautiful and egoistic writer Delia and her cynical husband Henry - heralds a period of dramatic change for the Mackenzies. Truth and Consequences is a comedy about love and its disguises, and identity and change - about the small disasters and sudden attractions that can turn even the most stable relationship upside down. A readable copy of the book which may include some defects such as highlighting and notes. Cover and pages may be creased and show discolouration.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Set in Elizabethan England, Burgess's first novel for four years centres on the life of Christopher Marlowe, who was killed in suspicious circumstances in a tavern brawl in Deptford 400 years ago. It portrays a theatre genius riven by sexual and political conflicts. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Waiting for the Train is set in Theresienstadt, the ghetto created by the Nazis in northern Bohemia as a staging post for the transport of Jews to Poland. The time is September 1944; the war is going badly for the Germans, and they are in a hurry to complete their 'Final Solution'. Rumours are rife among the Jews in the ghetto, even though nothing definite is known of the Nazis' intentions, or perhaps it is deliberately not believed. The heroine of the novel, Leah, an 18-year-old girl from Holland, has, like most of those around her, given up living in accordance with her beliefs. The narrator is a lad of seventeen, likewise still relatively unaffected by the moral disintegration around him. By chance he encounters Vili Feld, a pre-war acquaintance who had seduced his young girlfriend. Vili takes the narrator to the tiny attic he shares with Leah. Thus begins an erotic entanglement that ends with the narrator and Vili being sent to their deaths in the East. Leah travels with them, but in a different part of the train. Conditions on this journey are unspeakable; Lustig evokes them memorably in this novel about impossible moral choices made in appalling circumstances. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. The year is 1957 and the place is Paris, where the psychic wounds of World War II have barely begun to heal. Saffie, a young German woman, becomes maid, then wife, to Raphael, a privileged French musician who finds her remoteness provocative and irresistable. One day in the old Jewish quarter of the city, where she has taken Raphael's flute to be repaired, Saffie meets a Hungarian instrument maker - and all their lives are unexpectedly, dramatically altered. Driven by passion but damaged in different ways by war, these two people find themselves crossing dangerous boundaries. Told against the rising tide of violence unleashed by the Algerian conflict, The Mark of the Angel builds to a shocking climax conveying the loss of innocence and the tragic irony of these lives twisted out of shape by the weight of history. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Good. St Tiggywinkles, the Stockers' garden rescue centre, has grown in twelve years to become Europe's first purpose built wildlife teaching hospital, caring not only for hedgehogs but for many other species of wild creature, from barn owls and badgers to starlings and seals. The Hedgehog and Friends contains tales of orphaned foxes, hedgehogs in Parliament Square, badgers on television and also life-saving plastic surgery on Mikki, the wild rabbit. The book includes charts and practical instructions on how to feed and care for wild creatures. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. **THE No.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** **A THE TIMES TOP 10 CRIME BOOK OF THE DECADE** HARRY HOLE'S DEADLIEST ENEMY IS BACK. AND OUT FOR BLOOD Harry is in a bad place: Rakel has left him, he's working cold cases and notorious murderer Svein Finne is back on the streets. THE FIRST KILLER HARRY PUT BEHIND BARS IS OUT TO GET HIM. Harry is responsible for the many years Finne spent in prison but now he's free and ready to pick up where he left off. A MAN LIKE HARRY BETTER WATCH HIS BACK. When Harry wakes up with blood on his hands, and no memory of what he did the night before, he knows everything is only going to get worse. 'This is the king of Norwegian crime on top form' Observer *JO NESBO HAS SOLD OVER 55 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE* The explosive new Harry Hole thriller Killing Moon is out now! Jo Nesbo was a Sunday Times number one bestseller with Macbeth on 20/09/2018. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Spanning three years in the life of the writer Katherine Mansfield during the First World War, this novel follows the ups and downs of her relationship with Jack Middleton Murry and her struggle to write the 'new kind of fiction' which she felt the times demanded. She is restless, constantly on the move, in and out of London, to and from France, even once into the war zone to be with her French lover, novelist Francis Carco. For a short time, Mansfield is able to behave as though the war is merely 'background', but her ardent relationship with her brother, who arrives from New Zealand to fight in France, makes detachment impossible - as does her love for Jack's Oxford friend Frederick Goodyear, also a soldier. The war's shadow remorselessly darkens all their lives, but only increases Mansfield's determination to break through as a writer. While sticking scrupulously to what is known about Mansfield's life and those of her friends (a cast that includes D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrel and Virginia Woolf), this novel is extraordinary in taking the reader beyond the point of biography into the mind, emotions and sensibility of its subject. It is a sharp, subtle and appealing portrait of the person of whose work Virginia Woolf wrote: 'It was the only writing I was ever jealous of.'. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. On a journey from the Jersey Shore to the Pacific Ocean the driver crosses an America twisted beyond all recognition, as if in a fevered dream. He is pursued by ghosts of his traumatic past and the police, who have discovered the disturbing secret in his basement. On and off the road, we glimpse the lives of people who are touched by the driver in one way or another - a porn star who can no longer perform; a widower looking for love; two parents who return day after day to the spot where their son was killed. Speeding past and stopping off along the way, the driver meddles, mixes and murders, heading towards the edge of the New World and to his own macabre realisation of the American Dream. Cross Country Murder Song is a unique and visceral novel from a new voice in contemporary noir. Gripping, relentless and impossible to put down, it is a 21st-century road trip to the heart of darkness. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. These two novellas, MORPHO EUGENIA and THE CONJUGIAL ANGEL, are set in the mid-nineteenth century, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance. MORPHO EUGENIA is a lively Gothic fable of the Earthly Paradise, of the Victorian obsession with Darwinian theories of breeding and sexuality and the parallels between insect and human society. THE CONJUGIAL ANGEL, a philosophical ghost-story concerns Tennyson's IN MEMORIAM, published in 1850, mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. In every life, there are roads taken and untaken, choices made and dreams abandoned. And then there's golf. As a teenager, Tom Cox dreamed of sporting immortality. For four years he devoted himself to the game he loved. And then, one day, he walked away. But as he got older, those dreams kept coming back. Perhaps it was turning thirty, perhaps it was winning his local club's scratch championship, perhaps it was having his first hole in one, but he decided it was time to start again, to live the dream for real. So he switched off his computer, grabbed his checked trousers and headed for the golf course. To turn pro. There are two ways of becoming a full-time professional sportsman. The first and most favoured approach goes something like this: be born gifted; take up your chosen game early; practise incredibly hard; let nothing stand in your way. The second is more controversial. Just turn up. As long as you're wearing the right socks, you should be OK. Confident in the simplicity of this approach, Tom headed out for the course. What was eight years playing for England Boys and a lifetime of top-class coaching compared to his whippy wrist action and trusty 1980s putter! The Open Championship was only five of the best rounds of his life away and, given a few warm-up tournaments, how hard could it be? One physically and psychologically gruelling year later, Tom returns with the story of how he survived the world of professional golf. Are the pros really so much more gifted than the rest of us? Does an amateur stand a chance? And will he finally get a birdie? Find out, in this hilarious account of one man's pursuit of his dreams. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. During the Second World War Eric Lomax was forced to work on the notorious Burma-Siam Railway and was tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio. Left emotionally scarred and unable to form normal relationships, Lomax suffered for years until, with the help of his wife, Patti Lomax, and of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, he came terms with what happened. Fifty years after the terrible events, he was able to meet one of his tormentors. The Railway Man is a story of innocence betrayed, and of survival and courage in the face of horror. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Like many young Westerners in the 60s and 70s, Matteo leaves his home in Italy to search for spiritual enlightenment in India. Parallel to this narrative runs the "Mother"'s story, from her childhood in Egypt and her travels in Paris, Venice and New York, to her search for divine love in India. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. On a hot summer afternoon, a young English girl arrives to spend the weekend at the house of an elderly American writer, brought there by his Swiss publisher. The writer is dying, she, newly married, is just embarking on her life. As soon as they set eyes on each other, each knows that they have encountered the only person who will ever make them happy; they also know that their love is impossible. There follows a weekend of electric sexual tension and raw passion, a week-end that allows them to live at a pitch that neither has experienced before and will never experience again. Two striking voices, that of the old man and the young woman, tell us the story of their weekend together. We learn about the repercussions on the young woman's life, and how she cannot erase from her memory the man who gave her, briefly, everything life had to offer. Candida Clark conveys the extreme, paradoxical emotions of this novel: tenderness and brutality, love and dislike, anger and boredom, ecstasy and despair. Full of strong, sensual imagery, this is an extremely impressive debut. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The time: 1946-2000. The Place: Elmwood Springs, Missouri. Right in the middle of everywhere, which could be anywhere. World War II has ended and the joyous transitions to peace are being - mostly - embraced. Bobby Smith, ten, is the effervescent son of the well-known radio hostess Neighbour Dorothy, who broadcasts every day from her living room, via the tower in her backyard, to an eager, and at times lonely, audience. And meet the Oatman Family Southern Gospel Singers at a pharmaceutical convention in Memphis, where they blow the place away; Hamm Sparks, a super-salesman everyone likes and trusts, who soon sells all of Missouri; and the phenomena known as the Sunset Club, Dinner on the Ground and the Funeral King. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Good. This novel by the author of "The Newton Letter", "Mefisto" and "Kepler" is a blend of thriller and black comedy. It is the first-person prison testimony of Freddie Montgomery, a monologue reflecting on forty years of aimless drifting and a crime that has destroyed his life. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. In the blaze of a Carolina summer, among the poison ivy and loblolly pines, eight Marines are killed almost casually by misfired mortar shells. Deciding that his battalion has been 'doping off', Colonel Templeton calls for a 36-mile forced march to inculcate discipline. The Long March is a searing account of this ferocious ordeal - and of the two officers who resist. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.